4thaccount

It looks like y'all are mostly a Python shop?

Also it has a bunch of common desktop shortcuts installed and canonical metrics all disabled...and disk encryption.

Yes. System76 is definitely expensive, but their customer service is the best I've seen for any product period. They have a super snappy site with real people you can talk to in Denver and ask off the wall questions about the hardware and OS. To some, having that kind of support is worth a markup rather than trolling through Ubuntu forums and asking StackExchange answers. My last few Linux machines were all repurposed Windows computers though. It's also nice to help support Linux on desktop this way.

Does anyone know Alan well enough to answer the question "will he ever publish a magnum opus designed to explain the distillent of what he's learned"?

That might be worth reading if he can make it explainable to mere mortals. I know he has some videos and articles, but I'd like something to spend the next few years slogging through to get a better understanding of why he thinks everything is a turd. I fully understand the issue of our current operating systems, programming languages, and tools being a steaming pile of garbage, but I don't think that is what he's really referring too. He thinks we should be seeing much further than that. I can't disagree, but there is a lot I don't fully comprehend.

Interesting article on doing more manufacturing in America. The problem is that this is an extremely expensive and niche product.

I want slightly more expensive products made in the USA and I'll pay a premium for it, but nothing astronomical.

If I can pay 20% more on coffee and chocolate to make sure the farmers were paid a living wage, we can do similar things in the US. I understand that US wages are much higher and make this more difficult, but it would be a step in the right direction. Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?

I'd like comments from anyone with more understanding of the issues.

Anyone experienced with ImGUI ever use Rebol and Red's DRAW DSL?

I believe Rebol's GUI support is even easier to use than ImGUI, but of course it can't be embedded and used in the same way as ImGUI either. I wonder if non Red projects could possibly hook into Red's system once Red/System gets closer to C level performance?

There is a large interview with Chuck Moore of Forth fame on O'Reilly Safari Online.

Much of the interview focuses on things like how an OS is uneccesarry and shouldn't exist. Granted, he has drastically different needs than the average user.

"Rust is the new APL,like I said"

I know you're trying to compare it to APL as that language mostly died off and is thus obscure, but I think the analogy is a little off.

While APL is weird, it is actually really easy for me (someone with less than 15 hours playing with the language in total over the past few years) to code up some basic scripts a lot easier than something like C++.

I'm being absolutely serious too. C++ is pretty low level and as a Python coder I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand with everything required to do something simple. APL is basically built around passing arrays of numbers or strings to weird symbols that operate on the whole array. This means I can do text processing with only a few symbols and a library function (and all interactively) where C++ requires lots of boilerplate and debuggers and compilation and pointers. In short, APL seems to be a lot less complicated than both Rust and C++ in my opinion and most using it have very little formal programming experience and have no problem picking it up from what I've read.

I know what you were essentially trying to say though.

This. They still make content, but I believe it's all digital.

I don't think they create paper books anymore. Is that incorrect?

I have lots of programming books (30-40) from half a dozen publishers and Manning is one of my favorite along with NoStarch Press. O'Reilly is probably third, but they don't make books anymore. Packt is alright, but you often don't get the same thing as a Manning book. They're more like a way for someone to quickly get something out that works, but there are definitely misspellings and grammatical errors, but nothing that would prevent you from learning.

I borrowed this from someone at work once. I never got a chance to write a Fortran app, but the book wasn't bad.

It's very fast and there is a new Manning book about to come out on Modern Fortran that is all about parallel Fortran.

In addition to being fast, I find it considerably easier to read than C++ as it isn't as low level and doesn't have as much noise (at least the later versions like Fortran 90).

It also makes writing numerical code easy as it was truly built for high performance scientific computing.

A lot of older scientific projects run on Fortran and although I know some projects that were migrated to C++, it wasn't due to any defect from the language besides it not being taught very often in colleges now outside of some astrophysics classes where it was once a mainstay in engineering and science curriculums.

There are several compilers available, but a lot of them are commercial and some are expensive. There are free versions as well of course.

Thank you! I'll look.

As someone without any knowledge of OSTree or Fedora Silverblue, can you go into more detail?

I've used Xubuntu for years as a weekend OS for side projects. It seems to work well.

Neat...I just wish there was an easy way to give the basemap library a 3-item tuple with (lat, lon, value) and have it automatically do a heat map and not just plot the points. That is an option in some software.

As if the algorithms behind numerical methods weren't hard enough, now we have to add parallelism :)

It wasn't too bad. If you look up the Mathematica GraphTheory primitives for building diagrams it is pretty simple.

To give an example of a diagram showing love interests you create a variable for each person and set is equal to a picture of them.

Then, you simply create a map that represents each of the relationships like Jerry <-> Alice to show that Jerry and Alice like each other, Jerry->Samantha to show Jerry likes Samantha, but it isn't returned and so forth.

At the end, wrap it all in the command to create the diagram (there are lots of them) and you're done.

Thanks for the hard work in the Mathematica SQL area.

I know y'all have lots and lots of database documentation, but I've had trouble commenting from Mathematica to Oracle via ODBC. It's a tad confusing, but I'm sure I'm doing something simple wrong. In R, this was really easy, but surprisingly complicated in Mathematica. Do y'all have any kind of step by step doc in that arena? SQLite was of course easy, but I think Oracle requires the use of JDBC with Mathematica and that's where I get lost.

Yes and No. If you ignore Python being a powerhouse in the scripting world and just focus on numerical stuff like matrix and symbolic math, both Python and Mathematica have that. Some people like myself that love Python and know how to use it and Numpy bought Mathematica licenses. I still use Python for scripting, but I've moved most exploratory work to Mathematica. I miss Python's Spyder IDE, but with Mathematica I can enter equations into Notebooks much more elegantly than having to do OO code which looks significantly different than the math.

Octave and Scilab are more Matlab like replacements as a user below commented. Sure both are for mathematical code, but Octave is more for numerical work and Mathematica for Symbolic computation.

However, Mathematica is powerful in a much bigger way than Octave. Mathematica is more like a very successful and commercial lisp in that it has zillions of composable and we'll documented functions for everything. You don't just copy in a link to an image you want to do something with, but can literally copy paste an image into a function and immediately do stuff with it in a way I've never seen before. Recently I wanted to draw up pretty advanced network diagrams using the images our vendor used. I simply copy pasted them in and then used the graph theory primitives to draw a diagram. Then I noticed that I wanted to add a different picture and it didn't match the color scheme of the vendor. No problem...I just passed it to yet another Mathematica primitive to invert the colors. This was all REPL like interactive and easy to do. There are lots of little commands like this. My favorite example is a file open command that works on over 100 file types. The obvious ones like CSV, XML, JSON, .XLS, & TXT are all there, but so are other file formats like .MPS optimization files, common biology file formats, weather forecasting file types. Chaining this together is insanely easy. Suppose you want to solve a linear programming problem and you have a .MPS file. Just open the file and wrap it in the LinearProgram[] command and then wrap in a FileOutput[] command if I want to write to a text file. There's a lot more for Python where I have to import libraries and write loops.

Mathematica ain't perfect though. It has a large runtime and doing more complicated work doesn't scale as well as I would like for writing big programs. Code distribution is also harder. Nobody else on my team is going to want to install the Mathematica runtime to run my code.

Overall it is pretty nice though and I think it would surprise most HN users.

This. If I want anything installed it requires survey from IT and Legal and can take months.

If it is Java or C# and already in-use, it is pretty simple. If I wanted to install a Go compiler, it could get complicated. Not having Admin rights really slows down an organization. Especially if you're someone who likes to use multiple technologies (right tool for the right job). IT hates that. Note that I don't write production tools, just things to get my job done quicker (automation scripts, data analysis...etc).

My usual advice is to also check out Aaron Hsu's talks on YouTube and his posts on HN (user arcfide I think). Really eye opening and alien stuff.

Dyalog also sells a standard keyboard with the APL symbols printed on the keys. You might find that interesting.

Dyalog uses non ASCII symbols which are really cool to me and make the primitives very easy to learn. Check out tryapl.org to get a feel for it. You can also download a trial version and there is a free book. They have decent library support and full .NET support too as well as easy parsing for CSV, JSON, XML...etc. They have Dyalog APL notebooks, database access, multiplatform support, parallel and tacit features...etc. If it wasn't $1k a year for a license (honestly pretty reasonable) I'd use it pretty often. It just feels like they love their product and support it from the annual coding competitions, monthly webinars...etc.

J uses ASCII symbols and has a small community of very intelligent users that are stats smart, software smart, math smart...etc. It has great bindings to Lapack, built in graphs (well Dyalog does too) and tutorials called labs. The community is much smaller though and it doesn't have any parallel primitives. J is free to use, but the Jd columnar database is commercial, but very reasonably priced.

Honestly, both are awesome, fun, powerful, and plain cool.

I'm not aware of too many folks using A+ anymore as it is pretty ancient and hasn't been updated in a very long time.

Array languages I would consider for actual work are mostly:

Dyalog APL, J, and K if I could afford kdb+.

If I wanted to play with implementations I agree that Ok and Klong are pretty cool.

K uses traditional ASCII characters and is usually bundled with kdb+ for speedy timeseries analysis.

I would use Dyalog APL or J over K in many cases. K is also really expensive (kdb+)...I'm not sure about Shakti (the K inventor formed a new company and left the first one).

If I understand you correctly, why use K over another language like Java? Java is a good enterprise language, but K is a good analysis language. It is very terse and powerful. Look up Kdb+.

Smalltalk is like this and so is SBCL with Emacs Slime mode.

Thank you. As someone who doesn't live in that part of the US, I frequently forget about Cambridge the US city.